


An Insatiable Hunger

by Josey (cestus), junko



Series: Shattered Souls [8]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 04:44:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestus/pseuds/Josey, https://archiveofourown.org/users/junko/pseuds/junko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s now clear what’s happening to Renji, but can Urahara and the gang stop things before they go too far?</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Insatiable Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> This is a canon divergence that takes place after the Aizen’s betrayal and before the Bount Arc.

The explosion of captain-level hollow-tinged reiatsu from the direction of the shōten sent Kisuke hurtling back there at high speed, leaving Tessai and the others to keep hunting for Zabimaru. Damn it, he'd left Ichigo behind so he _wouldn't_ get involved in any battles and what happens? Abarai takes it into his head to behave like the dog he is and crawl home. If Kisuke had known that would happen, he wouldn't have left in the first place.

Of course by the time he arrived, they'd already engaged. Sparks flew as Ichigo parried and dodged Abarai's shikai, riding the power of it back and shunpo-ing forward to hack and slash at Abarai's semi bone-sheathed body. It was a pretty pointless exercise. From where Kisuke was standing, even he could see that the spikes on Abarai's elbows and the spines rising from his back were a pretty efficient armour. And that tail was like a second Zabimaru, half sword, half whip, and entirely too quick. 

At best Ichigo was keeping him busy and not much more. If he wanted to penetrate that bone and do real damage, he was going to have to release his bankai, and Kisuke would really prefer he didn't do that in the middle of Karakura. As it was, Abarai's reiatsu was going to be setting off alarms all over Soul Society.

"Kurosaki-san! Oh, Kurosaki-san!" Kisuke called brightly. When Ichigo shot him a disgruntled glare, he waved happily and said, "Could you please take your friend indoors to play. The moon has eyes, you know." He could almost see the wheels in Ichigo's head turning and reaching the same 'oh shit' conclusion that Kisuke had come to. 

The next second the sky lit-up and, "Getsuga tenshō!" roared out of the heavens. Abarai came tumbling backwards, caught up in the force of the reiatsu, and slammed into the ground near Kisuke's feet. He was up and moving the next second, and Kisuke had to duck to avoid the lash of that jagged bony tail before Abarai sprang into the dust-cloud and the clash of metal said he'd found Ichigo again. 

Kisuke held his hat on with one hand and waved his fan in front of his face with the other, coughing lightly as he waited for the dust to settle. As it did, his fan slowed, incrementally, to a stop and an expression of utter disbelief spread over his face. His shop! His poor, wonderful, stood through wars, invasions and innumerable economic downturns, shop!

The roof was gone. Not sliced away, but entirely and completely vanished. Half the west wall was lying in the yard and a gouge the depth of a car stretched from there to the edge of the roadway, where a small fountain suggested a water main had burst. 

Stuff Soul Society noticing, it was going to take some clever tap-dancing to stop Karakura's civil amenities department from turning up!

"Shit! Sorry about that!" Ichigo's voice came from above.

Kisuke dragged his gaze from the ruin that had once been his home, up to the over-powered, overenthusiastic, over-grown toddler playing cero tag across the night sky. Hang on? Cero?

Oh, that was impressive. Kisuke couldn't help a little bounce of glee as Abarai fired mini-cero after mini-cero from a fork like a snake's tongue at the tip of his tail, sending them after Ichigo like lethal paint balls. Ichigo was dodging them easily, a fact which seemed to be infuriating Abarai if the bellows of rage were anything to go by. Well, good. If he was that annoyed then Ichigo shouldn't find it that hard to get him inside and once there Kisuke might actually be able to do something with him.

"I think you made the door wide enough," Kisuke called, not even attempting to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. At least Tessai's barriers should have protected their valuables, and the extremely volatile stuff was all underground. Even so, it was going to take some hard labour to fix it up and Kisuke knew just the two louts to provide it.

Ichigo slashed out another, thankfully much smaller, getsuga tenshō and shunpo-ed groundwards in its wake - straight through the floor going by the sound of splintering wood. Didn't he know how to open doors? Kisuke blamed Isshin. He obviously hadn't brought the boy up properly. 

Abarai followed him, voice warbling with rage as his prey slipped away yet again. But finally their joint reiatsu, which had been lighting up the locale like a small nuclear reactor, with all the unpleasant side-effects that implied, vanished. 

Kisuke allowed himself a brief breath of relief before casting a low powered tenteikūra and bringing Tessai up to date with what was happening. Despite Abarai's reappearance and degeneration, their priorities remained the same. It was vital that they find Zabimaru and allow the pair to rebond. That was, without a doubt, Abarai's only chance of regaining his mind.

But in the meantime, he had to be contained. Ichigo was undoubtedly doing an excellent job down below but he couldn't last forever and with each second that passed, the chances of one or the other getting seriously injured increased. Abarai needed to be contained and, with Tessai out of the picture, that was a task only Kisuke could perform.

By the time Kisuke got down to the training grounds, Abarai's cero had grown in size and strength and the pair had moved on to levelling small mountains. Ichigo, still not in bankai, looked exhausted. That wouldn't do.

Kisuke pointed a finger at the pair and said, "Byakurai."

White fire shot towards towards them, but despite the lightning crackling along the ground between them, neither acknowledged Kisuke's presence. He might as well have been part of the scenery. 

A particularly strong attack from Abarai then sent Ichigo slamming into an overhang.

_We must protect the boy,_ Benihime said, her tone pointed. _He is necessary._

_I am fully aware of that_ , Kisuke sniped back. _However since this turn of events is manifestly my fault, it rather behoves me not to slaughter Abarai out of hand._

She acknowledged his argument, rising to his summons and slicing a scarlet crescent across the battlefield that disintegrated a large rock metres from Abarai's nose.

That got his attention. Kisuke was treated to a momentary glimpse of a scarlet mane and the full weight of rank hollow reiatsu, before Abarai vanished. Shunpo, but faster. Faster than Kisuke was used to seeing on anyone except perhaps Yoruichi. Was this the hollow version? Sonìdo?

The cero came next, a barrage of them, peppering Kisuke's location and turning the air around him crimson with power. He held his ground, his only concession to self-protection a slight twist of his wrist to deflect the strongest of them. On the heels of that came Abarai himself, arrowing in from the sky, Zabimaru and his long jagged tail closing in around Kisuke like massive jaws. 

At the last moment, Kisuke leapt, the command on his lips as he shunpo-ed, "Shibari, Benihime!" His best short term capture and hold technique.

The net dropped, falling across Abarai's shoulders and sending him tumbling and writhing to the ground. It was eating into him, scorching everywhere it touched and maintaining it without killing him was going to be impossible. Kisuke followed it up with hyapporankan and then, as he released the Shibari, gochūtekkan. That seemed to do the trick, at least for the moment. 

The ground was still shaking from the force of the pillars landing when Ichigo arrived beside him. As usual he'd managed to cut his scalp and he swiped irritably at the blood flowing freely into his right eye.

"What now?" he asked.

"Now you babysit our reluctant guest, while I go and prepare something that will hold him until we locate Zabimaru."

"Okay." With a shrug, Ichigo wandered over to Abarai and hunkered down, Zangetsu propped up in front of him. "Hey, asshole, you damn near blew me away with those red things," he began conversationally. Beneath the seal Abarai squirmed, lifting his head and letting loose a scream of rage. The sclera of both his eyes had turned blood red, and the irises a venomous green that reminded Kisuke of Zabimaru's gigai. Apparently he'd been inspired when he included that in the design.

"Sucks to be you, huh," Ichigo was saying. "Won't be long though. Hat and clogs is gonna find Zabimaru for you, then you'll be back to being the annoying shithead you normally are."

"Za-za-bi." It was more a guttural grunt than words.

"Yeah, see, you remember. Not as dumb as you look. Good thing, if you ask me..." 

Kisuke left them to their bickering and headed for the storage room beneath lab two. He'd been planning on bringing Abarai and Zabimaru together spontaneously, removing the need to contain either one of them for any length of time. Apparently that wasn't to be, so now he needed to create something strong enough to hold an arrancar level hollow for several hours without destroying it, and the last time he'd been involved in something like that, Tessai had been the one in charge of the kido part since Kisuke had been doing his best to work out how to fix what Aizen had broken.

As he sifted through his old research, reminding himself which bakudō had proven most effective against this level of hollow, he found himself distracted by the unprecedented consequence of Abarai's separation from his zanpakutō. Not in his wildest moments of theory building had Kisuke expected this experiment to drag him back into the realms of hollowfication. It was a subject he'd turned away from very deliberately having seen the effects of it first hand.

But given that it had happened, could Abarai's transformation hold a clue as to how Aizen had forced hollowfication on his victims? The hōgyokou was responsible of course, but Kisuke had only ever managed to ascertain that it _did_ break down the boundaries between hollow and shinigami, not _how._

From what Kisuke knew of official severings , they were always accomplished by first sealing the criminal's reiryoku, followed by the complete destruction of their zanpakutō. The process inevitably crippled any shinigami subjected to it and normally they died within weeks, wasting away in madness and despair much like Mayuri's normals had. But again, to Kisuke's knowledge, none had ever hollowfied, which made them different from Abarai.

Perhaps they simply hadn't been powerful enough. Abarai was captain level and on the rare occasions those types were executed it was always by means of the Sōkyoku, which destroyed the entirety of the shinigami's soul at once, so there was no chance of unwanted side effects there. On the other hand, Abarai's zanpakutō hadn't been destroyed at all, though since the free flow of reiryoko between them had been prevented, one could liken it to a type of binding or seal, Kisuke supposed.

What if Aizen had sealed the Vizard's zanpakutō away _within them_ somehow? His kido was certainly good enough for such a feat even back then, and focused through his immature hōgyokou, the seal could have been both instantaneous and reiryoku impervious. 

An image of Abarai and Zabimaru during their long drawn out separation sprang into Kisuke's mind and he shuddered. Compressing that, and Abarai's subsequent hollowfication, into mere moments would likely vaporise lesser souls. Like the artificial ones he'd used in his own experiments. And those normals and lower seats that had vanished out in the Rukongai all those years ago. Damn it, had he finally stumbled on the answer after all these years?

True, Abarai's hollowfication had been much slower than the Vizards, but then he'd had a small amount of Zabimaru's reiryoku inside the gigai with him, which reinforced the theory that it was the exchange of reiryoku that counted.

It was definitely an interesting theory, and one which bore further investigation, but didn't help with the current situation. He still needed a way to contain Abarai in the short term.

Kisuke returned to his notes and almost immediately found himself holding the design parameters for a old prototype gigai. The one which created an impermeable barrier beyond which reiryoku could not disperse. The one he'd used to stabilize the Vizards' physical forms. He'd always assumed that it was the application of the hōgyokou afterwards, re-fracturing the boundaries between hollow and shinigami, that had allowed their reintegration, but perhaps that wasn't the case. 

Did the hollow somehow replace the sealed zanpakutō? If that was the case, then forcing the Vizard into those gigai along with their zanpakutō could have been more pivotal to their survival than he'd originally thought. If the hōgyokou had played a role at all, it had probably been in breaking down Aizen's seal.

Probably. Maybe. If. 

That was far too much speculation for Kisuke's scientist mind, but even if he was only partially right, he needed one of those gigai. If Abarai was too far gone to fight his own way back even with Zabimaru present – and where the hell was she, by the way? - then forcing him into a sealed gigai with her might do the trick. 

Kisuke was halfway up the stairs when another thought occurred. Should he contact the Vizard? He was going to have to for Ichigo anyway, so perhaps he should do it sooner rather than later on the off chance they could help with this situation. After all, he no idea how they'd finally managed to gain control over their inner hollows. It wasn't a subject they'd felt happy discussing outside their own circle. And Hachigen would certainly be useful right now, since Tessai was elsewhere.

A massive explosion shook the floor of the storage room. Kisuke cursed under his breath. If Abarai had broken free already, things were likely getting serious down there. He needed to hurry. And he probably should contact Shinji. 

He spun back to the machine containing the logarithm for calculating the location of their current safe-house and that was when he saw it: a long platinum-blonde hair caught in the screw fixing the chair's backrest in place.


End file.
